The gap between an approved plan and a running program is mostly sequencing. Teams that build the content first end up teaching things people already know; teams that assign before they have built anything spend the quarter apologizing for broken links.
The order below is the one that avoids both. Each step produces something the next one needs.
1. Measure before you build anything
Start with a short assessment of where people actually are. Not because it is rigorous practice, but because it changes what you build: half of what a plan assumes people need turns out to be already known, and something nobody listed turns out to be the real gap.
Two things make this assessment worth running rather than skipping. It has to be short enough that people finish it — fifteen minutes, on a phone, not a scheduled sitting. And the results have to break down by team and by role, because "the average score was 62%" tells you nothing you can act on, while "the Riyadh branch scores 40% on one topic and 80% on the rest" tells you exactly what to build.
Salalem drafts these assessments from the topic and the audience, so the slow part — writing plausible questions and distractors — is not what stands between you and a baseline. Someone on your team reviews and approves them before they go out.
2. Build against what the measurement found
Now build, and only for the gaps the baseline showed. This is where the measurement pays for itself: a program scoped to three real gaps is shorter, cheaper, and better attended than one scoped to the twelve topics the plan listed.
You do not have to author everything. Some gaps are already covered by material you own, some need something new, some are best served by an external resource, and some only close through a person — a mentor, a workshop, a rotation. Choosing the right one per gap is the whole point; assuming every gap is a course is the most common way a program becomes expensive and ignored.
3. Bring in the training that happens elsewhere
Workshops, conferences, job rotations, and courses bought from an external provider are part of the plan and belong in the same record as everything else. Schedule them where the rest of the training lives, say what counts as proof of completion, and collect that proof against the assignment rather than in an inbox.
This is a whole subject on its own, and there is a separate walkthrough of it in this section.
4. Assemble it into one program
By this point you have assessments, some built material, and some scheduled external activity. A program is those pieces in an order, with dependencies — the assessment before the content, the content before the practical session, the reassessment at the end.
Ordering matters more than it looks. A program whose pieces can be taken in any order gets taken in the easiest order, which is the one where the reassessment happens before anyone has learned anything.
5. Decide what is per person and what is per group
Two kinds of assignment, and using the wrong one is a common source of both overload and gaps.
- Per person: Driven by that individual’s assessment results and their role. This is where the baseline earns its keep — people skip what they have already demonstrated.
- Per group: A department, a role, or the whole company, for training everyone in that group needs regardless of individual results. Policy changes and required training belong here.
Then reassess with the same instrument you opened with. Using a different one at the end makes the comparison meaningless, and the comparison is the only evidence you will have when someone asks whether the program was worth its budget.